1. Nokia just rolled out new firmware OTA (Over The Air) update for the Nokia N8. The size of the update is just around 900 kb and it should be available to Nokia N8 users globally anytime from now.

2. I installed the update on Tuesday March 22nd 2011 at around 7 pm and to be honest, there’s no major changes that are visible. I believe the update is to fix bugs and also acording to Nokia Discussion Board, this PR1.2 is a voluntary update, which also brings improvements to Mail For Exchange and Ovi Maps, as well as Ovi Store.

We have released a voluntary software update for Nokia Symbian^3 smartphones primarily to address a synchronization issue identified in a limited number of Nokia smartphones using Mail for Exchange on Microsoft Exchange Server 2010, Service Pack 1.

We listen to people’s feedback and continue to constantly improve the user experience of our smartphones with software updates. While we are working to make available the next software version, which will provide a renewed user experience, including new browser, refreshed widgets and home screen as well as many other performance enhancements, we released this software to quickly resolve a potential issue affecting our business users.

The software update will be available through the on-the-device Software Update or using Ovi Suite. The roll-out schedule will be determined operator by operator, market by market.

3. The OTA update process went very smooth over WiFi connection. Honestly, this OTA technology is very welcomed. Gone are the days where I need to hook my Symbian smartphones to a Windows PC to update the firmware. OTA is verey useful for people who dont use Windows PC like me

4. Please ensure the Nokia N8 battery is fully charged before doing the OTA update or else your Nokia N8 will go bonkers.

5. It’s already fourty hours after installing the update, and during that time, I use my Nokia N8 as my main phone for calls, texts, Gravity-ing, lots of web-surfing using the spanking new Opera Mobile 11 and sometimes Opera Mini 6, emailing via Mobile Documents, reading documents via Picsel Smart Office etc, etc. Internet connectivity via WiFi, sometimes 3.5G and when out at places without those two, I use plain ol EDGE.

6. With all the above, I am very-very surprised to see that the battery in my Nokia N8 has not died! This is unbelievable! Previously, on PR1.0 and PR1.1, I can only squeeze around eighteen to twenty hours before the battery juice dried.

7. I mean, I dont know how, or what did the engineers do to the firmware but it seems my Nokia N8 battery life lasts longer. More than one hundred percent increase! I have not charge it yet, it was switched on last two nights when I went to bed and picked it up in the morning as usual. The battery just wont die!

8. I think there’s something wrong with my Nokia N8 battery. It might be broken after the update to PR1.2

9. I believe the update will be rolled gradually to all parts of the world, especially SIM free units.

10. Have you updated your Nokia N8 firmware (also C7 and C6-01) to PR1.2? Share your experience with us here yeah!

- Asri al-Baker
- For i-Symbian.Com
- March 24th 2011

1. Viewing office documents, is very important for road-warriors in modern day smartphones. It’s a must have feature which determines buying decision.

2. PDF, DOC, XLS and PPT are the most common file formats that people use. To some extent, there are those who use Open Document format.

3. By default, Symbian smartphones today, shipped with an application called Quickoffice. But it has not been updated for modern day use. The look and feel of Quickoffice feels the same today and five years ago.

3. With Quickoffice, viewing and editing is supported. But you need to be very patient to use it because it suffers when dealing with big files such as 200MB powerpoint.

4. There are also other office app for Symbian called Documents To Go. In my opinion, it is easier to use than Quickoffice and has better round-tripping compatibility but like Quickoffice, the Documents To Go UI is also a pain in to use.

5. Another important requirement for a good office app in my opinion is PDF file support. Both Quickoffice and Documents To Go did not have PDF viewer component.

6. But Quickoffice includes Adobe Viewer LE which is another relic from the S60 3rd Edition days. It is very painful to use and suffers a lot when rendering PDF files.

7. Enter Picsel Smart Office, an office app in steroid. It views common office file formats PDF, DOC, XLS and PPT, as well as JPG, PNG, BMP, GIF and TXT and it throws a beautiful UI.

8. It is also a document editor but I am not very fond of it’s editing feature.

9. For viewing office files, hands down, it is the best for Symbian at the moment. The rendering is fast, it doesnt eat a lot of RAM. Zooming and panning using one finger is also supported.

10. Take a PDF file for example, a 1.5MB file takes 9 seconds to be opened by Adobe Reader LE but Picsel Smart Office only took 3 seconds to open it. And the rendering is better, you can smoothly pan around the document.

11. Picsel Smart Office implemented a very visual UI. When the main interface is loaded, called the Visual Explorer, it allows users to browse the device for documents. It’s some kind of a file-browser actually.

A doc file, without "Reflo" function. Need to scroll left and right

With Reflow on, just scroll up and down

13. There’s another cool feature called Reflow. At the moment, it is only functioning inside DOC files. Would be great if it is also implemented when viewing PDF files. What Reflow does is reflowing the text to fit screen. No need to scroll left and right.

The "cover-flow" page viewer to scroll between pages in a document

14. For viewing Powerpoint file, it is also very fast and smooth. A 25MB 86 pages PPT file can be opened in 5 seconds. While Quickoffice took more than 10 seconds to render the first page…. Oh and Picsel Smart Office has this unique way to scroll between pages. It’s like “cover-flow”. Very nice and smooooootttthhh…..

15. There are many more functions inside Picsel Smart Office which makes it a valuable purchase for those need to view office documents on their Symbian smartphones.

16. More information at : http://www.picsel.com

17. Buy it from Ovi Store : http://store.ovi.com/44983

- Asri al-Baker
- For i-Symbian.Com
- March 23rd 2011

Disclaimer : I am not responsible if during using this method, your Symbian devices acted weirdly, or even explode. I use this method safely and did not experience any problem.

1. Google Documents is heavenly once you have a lot of documents hosted in it. In my case, it is my saviour after my laptop was stolen. I keep many important work-related documents in it for easy accessibility anytime anywhere with internet enabled devices. No need to carry thumbdrive everywhere I go.

2. There is no Google Documents (GDocs) app for Symbian. Contrary to what is available on iOS and Android. For example, there are many ways to connect to GDocs using iPad e.g. using Dataviz’s Documents To Go or Quickoffice or GoodReader.

3. When using GDocs on mobile devices, it is not about to edit or to do anything that we normally do using our desktops or laptops. But it is about enabling access to our file archives on GDocs. We can access information, vital information that we need to make decisions, anytime anywhere. In short, we can view them, at least.

4. I spent some time trying to figure out how to access my GDocs files on my Symbian smartphones. I want to be able to download, as well as upload some files on the move.

5. Using the built-in Symbian Web browser is a no go. This is because the UI is not optimised for Symbian. The fonts are small, the navigation is clunky and all the bad ingredients, made viewing GDocs files on my Symbian^3 smartphones a pain in the arse.

6. Just take a look at these screenshots of GDocs in action on Symbian^3 Web browser. It’s a pain to behold and more painful to use. Fail!

7. Symbian supports WebDAV, a series of extensions to the HTTP protocol and defines how basic file functions, such as copy, move, delete, and create folder, are performed across HTTP.

8. And I found this website : http://dav-pocket.appspot.com/ which offers WebDAV access to Google Docs for free. Yep. Gratis! Not even need to register.

9. Those who are concerned about security and so on, please read the disclaimer carefully. This service is brought to us by third party. They took the step because Google has yet to release WebDAV support for Google Documents.

10. For daredevils, follow the instruction below to access your GDocs using your Symbian^3 smartphones WITHOUT any third party apps!

Step One : Open/Launch Filemanager

Step Two : Options – Map New Drive

Step Three : Fill the informations :
Name : Any name you want. e.g. Google Docs 1
Address : https://dav-pocket.appspot.com/docs (***note the https ***)
Access Points : Select your preferred Access Point
Username : Your Google Documents username aka your full Gmail address
Password : Your Google Documents password

Step Four : Connect

Voila!

Once you are connected, you can do many operations. You can manage files and folders as if it is a local connected drive like what you can do with microSD or USB-On-The-Go.

You can set more than one GDocs account and connect them at the same time to move/copy file around easily between accounts without downloading them to your Symbian^3 smartphones first. Direct move/copy from Google Docs 2 to Google Docs 1!

Well… You get the point!

11. Please let me know how this method works on your Symbian^3 devices (N8, C7, C6-01 & E7).

12. If you want Dropbox, we have covered this as well at http://www.i-symbian.com/the-easiest-way-to-use-dropbox-on-symbian-smartphones/

- Asri al-Baker, March 12th 2011.

1. In my blogpost dated November 28th 2010, entitled “Funny Things About Qt for Symbian^3″, I mentioned something about Ovi Store 2.0 installation failure :-

“10. But that is not all…

12. Even with the correct Qt 4.6.4 installed, you will never be able to install Ovi Store 2.0 after a factory-reset on Symbian^3 devices. The ONLY way to get Ovi Store 2.0 back is via reflashing from your nearest Nokia Service Center. Or using Navifirm and Phoenix to reflash. How did I know? I HAVE TRIED

2. Ovi Store 2.0 installation failure will happen to you if you do “three-fingers-salute” i.e. the “real” hard reset i.e. the “real” format. Not soft-reset, not user data deletion. Not *#7370#.

3. Three-fingers-salute is by pressing the following combination on your Symbian^3 smartphones :
- Menu button
- Camera button
- Volume down
- All of the above must be pressed together, and then, press the Power button.

4. But. Today, February 26th 2011. I felt I need some adventure. And I decided to give my N8 a treatment it deserves and went to apply this procedure. I know, I wont be able to use Ovi Store on it. But that is not a big deal to me because I kept a number of SIS/SISX files inside the microSD card, which I can use to install all my favourite apps later.

5. And the journey begins! 1, 2,… 3,… Boom!

6. Wiped out all data inside my N8. Phew….

7. After the process, I switched on the N8, blablabla… and the first thing I did was to check SW Update. Lo and Behold!!! Ovi Store is there to be downloaded. The size of the file is 15 MB but hey! I’m on unlimited data plan so it’s nothing!

8. Downloaded it, took a couple of minutes. After installing Ovi Store downloaded from SW Update, it prompts me that there is an update, and asked me whether I want to install it or not. Yes please…

9. So, another few minutes and the latest Ovi Store is now installed. I wont use it that much but for completeness sake and also once in a while, I just want to know what’s new, I use it.

10. Thank you Nokia for finally making it possible to install Ovi Store 2.0 on Nokia N8 after hard-reset, WITHOUT the need to use Phoenix, or bringing it to the nearest Nokia Service Centre. \

Cheers!

*** Some weird thing happen to my WordPress. I cant upload files to my server. Can someone assist?…

Asri al-Baker, February 27th 2011

1. Mobile Documents, the alternative Email client for Symbian, which, in my opinion, is not just another regular email client, it’s a WORK OF ART.

2. A few days ago, Visiarc announced it’s cooperation with Nokia Betalabs to host Mobile Documents in Betalabs’ website, to access more potential users and to collect more feedbacks.

3. At the same time, Visiarc also announced a new version of Mobile Documents, optimised for Symbian^3 devices. You can download the new version (0.9.19) from Nokia Betalabs at the link in the above paragraph.

4. I’ve used Mobile Documents for a couple of months now, and I am a fan! Honestly, it’s not perfect, has some bugs and needs overhaul in the UI department. However, I stand by the concept and I share Visiarc’s vision of a powerful mobile email solution. Mobile Documents cannot be taken lightly, it’s the signs of more beautiful and powerful things in the future.

5. To understand and dig deep into the vision, I interviewed Peter Lindgren, CEO of Visiarc, via email somewhere in November 2010. And I am honoured for his answers. Text interview is a traditional i-Symbian.Com feature which we love to do since aeons ago. Among others, we have interviewed Steve Litchfield, Sander Van Der Wal, and aso Malcolm Lithgow (to name a few) over the years.

6. Text interview is easier to digest, you can re-read many times, you can stop reading anytime you want and you can skip to any particular topic in the interview if you want.

7. I hope you enjoy reading this interview as much as I wrote it It’s a looong interview, so take a cup of coffee and enjoy!

8. Oh! And there’s a nice little surprise at the end of this interview

Introduction
———-

1. Hi Peter. How is it over there?

Hi Asri. Winter is approaching and we already have had our fair share of snow storms. Being this far north, close to the polar circle, days are short and nights are long and black. It’s nice but very different from what you have. I actually visited Malaysia a month ago, very nice, but thirty hot and humid degrees is perhaps a bit too far at the other end.

2. Can you introduce yourself? The longer the better?

I’m Peter Lindgren, the CEO and Co-founder of VISIARC. We’ve set out to mobilize email and are actively developing Mobile Documents, a cloud-boosted push mail service. For a bit more than a decade I’ve been pushing the envelope as an entrepreneur in Internet software development, marketing and sales in different companies. By training I have my Master of Science degree and Post-Graduate studies in Marketing and Management. But my greatest interest has always been art and design, graphical design especially. Luckily, I still can be hands-on engaged in the user interaction and interface design process, to make sure we don’t compromise the user experience. A profound interest in usability is something that we all share. When not on the job, I try to live an active life and depending on the season I enjoy different winter or water sports. Especially I love traveling in and near tropical waters. I’m also fortunate that in the sense that doing what we do on a global scale brings travel opportunities all over the world.

3. What does your schedule look like today? Business travels? Meetings?

Today is Sunday and my day off. Obviously my professional and personal life is a blur. I don’t mind. If you mostly do things that you are passionate about, then what does an unbalanced life look like?

4. Anything interesting coming from Visiarc in the very near future?

Yes there is. Expect interesting stuff around the shift between November and December (2010).

5. Lets start the interview shall we?

Of course.

Visiarc
—–

1. You (Visiarc) have won various awards throughout the years. How do you feel about being at the forefront of innovation?

Receiving recognitions for your innovations is very rewarding. Only user feedback means more. We are where we like to be right now. From experience, we know that being too far ahead is painful – likely just as painful or even worse than being left behind. In my world, there’s no shortage of innovative ideas and disruptive concepts.

2. How long have you established Visiarc? Have you achieved your targets that you envisioned for Visiarc since the beginning? Can you tell us a bit about it’s history?

We started out building and launching our first mobile cloud back in fall 2002. That was early, early as in a time when a brick (Nokia 9210 Communicator) was a leading and really the first smartphone. Cloud wasn’t even coined. From that perspective we’re kind of pioneers in the mobility space. That was way too early, but now I think time is catching up. Just two years ago, what we’re trying to do was too radical. In three years time, what we do will be a totally “given”. What I refer to is of course mobile apps that reach out into the cloud to add most of its value. Nokia started talking about it three years ago, powerful servers in the cloud, fast networks and smart phones. A couple of years ago Microsoft adopted this strategy, Software + Service. This year Google says mobile first. Of course, I say…

3. How many people in your team? Do you have offices outside Sweden?

We’re just eight people today, a really small but tight team. VISIARC is a private company and just as you say, we’re based in Sweden. But today, in the networked Internet era, you don’t necessarily need more to start a global mobile cloud business, any online business for that matter. Yet, we do. But that’s just more a consequence of the scope and reach of our business concept and vision.

4. What does Visiarc mean? Is it a Viking word?

VISIARC is a totally man-made word that means nothing anywhere, but has the one increasingly important characteristic – being globally unique – so that any search hit leads to you, and only you. Just try google, we’re alone and on the top of the world at zero cost.

Actually it has a meaning too. The first part “visi” refers to visualization, a key concept, viewing of emails, attachments and documents. “Arc” is a common feature but also refers to a bridge. Bridges bring people closer together, just as messaging and email. If you take a look at the logo the “A” and “V” are the same, two stylized eyes looking in each respective opposite direction. That provides a 360 degree view, representing both our focus on viewing as well as our global scope. Sorry, no heritage to the vikings to be found.

5. What is the mission and vision of Visiarc?

Mission, well I’m not sure we’ve headed out on any holy mission, but we want to make things more convenient and not necessarily just a little at a time. I like our vision – to spread the rich messaging tool we’re building to every person on this earth for free – to give everyone a first-class Internet voice. Our Freemium subscription based model will make that possible. Free email will be free with us – any document, any email, any attachment, on any device, from any source, on any network, anywhere, anytime – instantly & securely – to and from anyone. I guess if we succeed, Mobile Documents will soon become a household name in the global village.

Mobile Documents
—————

1. Can you share with us the background for Mobile Documents? How did the idea come into the picture and why?

Email as we know it is older than the web and is basically still the same as back in the 70s and 80s. Yet we’ve seen no innovation in email since push mail, and that’s ten years ago. Take anything else mobile that is ten years old and compare to today (phones, laptops, navigators, web browsers etc) and you will conclude they are as different as day and night. Email though remains the same. Traditional email is not only dated, it’s outdated.

Everyone uses email and everyone is taking it so much for granted. Revolutionary thoughts and changes are and has simply been overlooked, since “we all know what email is”. Who asks what could email be?. We did and we also asked ourselves how can we create something that is radically different? And even if the answer means a disruptive solution, can we make it a plug-and-play technology to fit the present, the legacy? Simply, to really mobilize email, a drastically different approach is what is required, a cloud-boosted approach.

Then why email? Well, email is dominant. For a fact, it’s the most popular and fastest growing mobile Internet activity. It’s not mobile first, it’s mobile mail first. Mobile mail is 4x larger than #2 and #3. A whopping 42% of the time spent on mobile Internet in the US is email, up from 36% last year according to Nielsen . #3 is social media (Twitter/Facebook) and it grew only from 8% to 10% last year, 3x slower than email! Email usage is increasing every year, and we are the sole company to address the root cause of the #1 problem with mobile mail.

This is today. We identified this development to come several years ago, and solving this problem is what drives us.

2. Mobile Documents, in a way, is competing against Nokia’s own solution called Nokia Messaging Email which also does push email. What is the most important feature of Mobile Documents that distingush it from other competing products out there?

That’s easy. Mobile Documents offers mobile documents. Nokia Messaging doesn’t. There are other differences as well. Nokia is taking its messaging closer to the social networking space while were concentrating on the last mobile frontier in email, managing the steady stream of ever-increasingly larger attachments and documents ending up in mailboxes. In a way this also makes Mobile Documents more professionally and business oriented than the more personal and social path Nokia Messaging is following. Last but not least, Mobile Documents will not be free, it’ll be freemium.

3. Email 2.0 can be seen a lot in Mobile Documents’ product sheets and marketing materials, can you share with us what is Email 2.0? Are we still in Email 1.0 now?

Mobile Documents represents a paradigm shift in email, that is also why we talk about Email 2.0. Ask yourself, ask your peers or ask any mobile email user what the major problem with mobile mail is. The answer is heavy attachments. When asking users how they deal with such heavy attachments they will tell you they don’t. They don’t deal with them at all on the phone, but they do that back in front of the computer, at home or in the office. Not very mobile, right?

Simply Email 1.0, it can’t do mobile documents, it can download only. Email 2.0 offers an entire toolbox to manage emails, attachments and documents – and we’re the only company to address this the #1 problem associated with the most popular mobile Internet activity. There are two key mobile concepts that Email 2.0 address; (1) remote viewing/reading and (2) remote handling/sending/managing emails, attachments and documents – instantly and without the need to download first.

Mobile Documents offers value to everyone in the mobile ecosystem. The user gets a better user experience and can do things easily that is basically not possible to do with traditional email – saving time and bandwidth. Companies can save 60-80% on roaming charges and receive a higher productivity and increased level of security with no documents in the field. Carriers/MNOs are offered multiple advantages. A fact is that one single optical fiber is about 250,000 time more capable than an entire 4G LTE phone cell, to be shared among all users. That means the air will always be crowded. With Email 2.0 (attachments today clog up networks across the globe, just ask) operators can deliver a better Quality of Service. Collaborating with VISIARC there are even more benefits to be reaped for an operator.

We’re used to do email on our computers. But the world is changing. There are today a little more than 1 billion PCs. Already there are more people with a smartphone. We’re entering a mobile age. Soon the majority of the global population and in particular the young will have a smartphone, but far from all a PC. And soon every single one will have Internet and email. In spring 2009, Nokia asked people with web mail if they wanted to mobilize their email. 78% said yes, but 10% had mobilized their email. Over the next couple of years we’ll go from a low penetration with a very few to a high penetration with a majority of the world population to have mobile mail. What will they opt for, probably email that is designed with mobility in mind, Mail 2.0.

4. Designwise, currently, Mobile Documents on Symbian does not look very attractive compared to the Android version. What enhancements can we expect to be implemented to the Symbian version in the near future? Will we see a more unified & professional user experience in Mobile Documents across all platforms?

I wouldn’t go so far as calling it unattractive. We’ve adopted a clean uncluttered minimalistic approach in line with the general look-and-feel and behavior that is standard on Symbian. We want our app to look and behave like everything else because that benefits our users.

Thank you, pleased to hear that you like the Android look. On Symbian you should expect enhancements in the unique key aspects of Mobile Documents, and quite soon. Soon after, you can also expect general enhancements based on user feedback. Correct, we’re also in the process of unifying and harmonizing the various platforms feature-wise. Yet, interaction-wise each app will stay true to respective platform behaviors.

5. How long did it take for Visiarc to develop Mobile Documents? From idea & concept to actual software running on real devices. How’s the
response from Symbian users?

We’ve been working pretty much full-time for three years now, from prototype to where we are today.

The response has been overwhelming. At first we asked ourselves, will anyone download? will they like it? Yes, they did! And yes, they do. We’re still in beta and there are a few fundamental features we don’t yet have that’ll be released shortly, still we receive mostly very positive reviews. I’m quite excited about that considering the relatively early stage we’re at yet.

6. Empowering users to do more with their email attachments seems to be the philosophy behind Mobile Documents. In your opinion, how connected devices (e.g. smartphones) can be fully utilised? For work and personal?

In the smartphone era of today, users expect nothing less than the same user experience they get from an app downloaded for personal use from an app store as they demand for an enterprise app. The software companies that don’t recognize that will meet the same destiny as the dinosaurs. And I agree, you’re absolutely right. We want people too, from one intuitive place, be able to manage their personal and professional life. That’s one reason why we’ll offer personal free email for free so that it can sit next to your work email. Because that’s how people live their lives, they need to manage both their personal and professional lives at the same time.

Yes, Mobile Documents is about empowering people, get more done on the go, instantly. Conceptually I don’t believe that we will or want to be carrying every single data file with us. Instead what we want is ways to gain mobile access to any of our files, regardless if it sits in my Google Docs or corporate mailbox. And that’s what we’re doing, starting to mobilize email, attachments and documents. Unless data files die, there is unlimited value that we can bring about, philosophically talking.

7. Other than the regular office files (doc, ppt, pdf etc), do you have future plan to support more file formats? Multimedia files maybe? Or how about ZIP/RAR file support where users can click on a ZIP attachment and Mobile Documents will extract the contents serverside allowing the contents to be viewed?

Indeed, very good suggestions. Let me put it this way. Doing most stuff in the cloud, neither is there any limit in what kind of operations, functions or manipulations we can do, nor is there any limit on the number of file types and formats we can support.

8. In Mobile Documents, viewing files are done by rendering them serverside, nothing is downloaded locally. How this is achieved? Do you develop the technology yourself? What is it called? You patent it? What is Cherrypicking?

First, we leave all the heavy stuff in the cloud server-side where we do all heavy-lifting. We open up attachments and documents there, render and on demand stream the bits and pieces that the users wants. We use the mobile network. This makes everything instant and it saves time and bandwidth. It requires minimal effort of the mobile phone since the smaller the screen the less information needs to be sent. This also means that all limited resources on the phone (CPU and storage) can be dedicated to maximize user experience (unlike opening, parsing, drawing etc). Plus, no downloaded documents means no documents that can be lost or stolen.

Second, traditional email requires users to download the entire email and attachments. Mobile Documents allows the user to manage the email and attachments without a download. Simply, like a shopping cart a user can collect and add attachments to new email without downloading, from any email sent or received in any account or even from other remote document sources in the cloud. Press send and it’s sent. Instantly. Since nothing resides on the local phone but are visual representations, everything regardless of actual size becomes light as a feather and instant. This we label Remote Attachment Management and Cherry Picking technologies – the core of Email 2.0. Basically we shortcut the unnecessary – download, find, add and send – loop that cost nothing but time and a lot of money if you’re roaming.

Yes, the underpinning key technologies of Mobile Documents are patent pending.

9. You also provide a web interface for users to manage their Mobile Documents’ accounts and their documents. What is your highest priority in ensuring users confidentiality and documents’ security? Are they encrypted?

Nothing is more important than to preserve our users security and privacy. Mobile Documents is secure. All connections between the mobile app and our cloud is secure. Even when users set up new email accounts, we always try to help finding the encrypted settings as long as the primary email provider allows secure connections, but not all do. We use strong 128-bit bank-level encryption over SSL.

Like most Internet services, we use a password based security model (no hardware crypto device). The length of the password then becomes critical. From this perspective Mobile Documents offers a nice security aspect. We offer the PIN. For example, a long twelve character password with a mix of numbers, small and large cap letters and alphanumeric characters on a mobile is just plain awkward. Such attempts are futile. Either users will disable password protection or change the password to a short easy insecure one, or simply stop using the app. With Mobile Documents you only input the long awkward password once. Then you create a PIN. The long password is not stored on the smartphone but a secure cookie that allows the user to login with the short convenient PIN code. Should the phone get lost or stolen the user simply logs in on the web interface and change password. The cookie then becomes invalid instantly. So even if the thief would know the PIN, it doesn’t allow access to Mobile Documents any longer. And with no emails or documents on the device there’s little to be lost, more than the actual device of course. To reset a password is also the main function of the web interface.

10. Can you share your future plans for Mobile Documents? Will you add features such as adding attachments to outgoing email from device, or adding eye-candy such as transition effects and cute icons? Will it be free forever? Ever?

Right away I can tell you that adding attachments from the local device is the single most asked for feature. It’ll be released soon too. There are a few new icons in the pipe. If they’re cute or not, I wouldn’t know. We will keep Mobile Documents free as in freemium after the beta period too.

Business Model
————

1. You offer Mobile Documents for free? Why?

Our vision is to bring Mobile Documents to every relevant mobile phone and we don’t want to discriminate any platform, device or network. We believe the next generation email should be free. If everyone can use Mobile Documents that benefits us in many ways as well. I simply see no reason to not let it be free.

2. Where does the money come from? As a business entity, how do you leverage your offerings?

We’ve financed it out of our own pockets and we still do. We have received some seed funding and loans though.

As soon as Mobile Documents becomes the best mobile mail, a premium version will be offered for advanced users on a subscription basis. These advanced users will leverage and pay for the free usage. People that don’t use email much will receive the Mobile Documents benefits for free.

One cool thing is that since we’re not a software company per se but rather subscription based, one user can have one or ten smartphones with Mobile documents all in sync at no extra cost.

3. Is Visiarc also involved in other businesses? Such as?

We’ve done a fair share of mobile development for other mobile companies over the years. Being on the cutting edge and working with R&D pre-release software, I can just say that I respect the signed NDAs.

4. Other than Mobile Documents, do you develop any other products or solutions?

No we don’t.

5. If it’s possible, can you share your plan for the near future? To ensure user’s confidence in your business?

We’ve been around since the dawn of the first smartphone and we’re still today more alive and kicking than ever. If you like what we do, support us.

As I always say, if there are things you don’t like, let us know so that we can fix them. If you like what we do, please let us know too, because that’s what motivates us.

Want to reach the entire team? Email us at support@mobiledocuments.com, or email me at peter.lindgren@visiarc.com.

Multi-platforms approach
———————

1. Most of your products are available only for Symbian, why?

Symbian offers the single largest user base and we have always been doing hardcore Symbian development. It was just a natural starting point for us. But we’re platform agnostic. We have a first early beta out on Android market and the next platform is iPhone.

2. What is your opinion on the announcement by Nokia to develop Symbian on it’s own? What will be the impact to software developers and those who build software and services around the Symbian ecosystem?

From a Nokia perspective I just understand. It makes a lot of sense. For Symbian as a platform Nokia was in the driver’s seat of its development already. I don’t really have an opinion.

3. How many Symbian smartphones do you own personally at the moment? Which one is your top favourite Symbian smartphone of all time?

Actually, I don’t know. They’re all in the office. I know that we have Nokia 9210, 7650, 3650, Sony Ericsson P800/P910, Motorola A1000 and many more to the more present E71, N97/mini, N8 and other. I’ve used all these and many more, except the Symbian based Motorolas for obvious reasons if you ever had one.

4. With Nokia’s commitment to Qt for it’s future Symbian smartphone and MeeGo mobile computers, will Mobile Documents also be ported to Qt? By the way, will you make Mobile Documents available for future MeeGo products? Your opinion on Qt?

I like Qt. I look forward to familiarize myself with Qt Quick. Probably, Qt is very underestimated. We’re a small company, but of course, how could Qt not be part of our road map?

5. Recently, you also released Mobile Documents for Android. How’s the response? What’s the difference developing it for Symbian and Android?

6. What’s the most challenging aspect in developing Mobile Documents? Is it the mobile client, or the web interface, or the technology? How do you put everything together?

All! But I must say that without the help of all our beta users we would not have been where we are today. They’ve helped us identifying all the peculiarities and imperfections in the real-world.

A long detour, if you’re not interested in our challenges just move on to the next questions. Mobile Documents today interfaces with almost any type of mail server out there (note. IMAP and Exchange) including all their imperfections, implementations of protocols and configurations. That’s a challenge to connect and stay in sync to push any email as soon as it arrives. Then, these emails are sent by various other servers (SMTP) created by a plethora of different mail clients or scripts – emails that are standards compliant but in reality more or less broken. That’s another challenge. Then add a steady stream of attachments generated by various kinds of native and not so native software saving files in various formats. Some are fine but many are imperfect and other are infected with different viruses that need to be quarantined. That’s yet another challenge. Take all that machinery to push every new email to every single user to allow instant reading, viewing, streaming, cherry picking and other you stat to understand the scope. Then add a rapidly growing number of new users atop of this. That is a massive hurdle that we’ve soon overcome.

In relation, dealing with internal things such as innovative interface design, internal protocol implementations etc becomes less challenging, even though it may take time to perfect.

7. Will you also port Mobile Documents to other mobile platforms? Windows Phone 7? Bada? Blackberry? iOS?

We’re platform agnostic. The mobile mail experience is quite different across all platforms that you mention. The most important aspect to decide if to support a platform or not is if we can add great value to the platform or not, more than just mobilizing attachments and documents. But ultimately, we’ll support every relevant platform including all you mentioned.

8. In the future, these platforms will be more advanced than what they are today. And their built-in email clients will also improve. Where do you position Mobile Documents to stay relevant?

The built-in clients are of course fundamentally our closest competitor. But they can never be what we are, per definition. Unless the built-in client is not only a client but a cloud-boosted push mail service with built-in mobile document capabilities, of course. But then, we’re not standing still and I have both one or two ideas where to take Mobile Documents. Believe me.

9. Of all these mobile platforms, which one, in your opinion, has the potential to be leveraged, and will benefit your company, strategically and financially?

If I just knew…

10. Are you going to license your solutions to other interested parties? OEM manufacturers for example?

We are the sole proprietary owner of all material rights to everything that constitutes Mobile Documents™. The most important aspect is to make our innovations benefit the users. There are many things that can be improved beyond what we can achieve as a third-party developer through working with mobile network operators, hardware manufacturers and others.

Conclusion
———

Please say something to our readers.

Mobile Documents offers cloud-boosted push mail – we’re in beta still – and what we want is your feedback and support. We can’t always deliver everything tomorrow even if we want, being a small company, but we try hard to. Please help us make Mobile Documents the best mobile mail and document sharing experience.

———

There you go… I also asked Peter about giving you, our readers some little present and here it is. The same elegant wallpaper used by Peter to decorate his Nokia N8 in the video above (Betalabs – first video in this interview). Get it here (right-click – download) :

2. Knowing that Nokia/Symbian devices are also using an internet browser based on WebKit, I thought, maybe I could try…

3. With my limited HTML skill, I wrote this very simple WRT Widget to launch Gmail iPhone web interface on Nokia/Symbian built-in Web browser, without the need to enter the long URL. Just click on the icon and the page will be opened. It’s just a shortcut to the correct Gmail GP (Grand-prix : the codename for Google iPhone interface) URL.

4. It is compatible with WRT enabled devices only (S60 3rd Edition FP1, S60 3rd Edition FP2, S60 5th Edition and Symbian^3). The screenshots below was taken from Nokia N8.

5. If you use supported Symbian devices from Samsung or Sony Ericsson, you can tell us whether it works or not

Enjoy! Oh!… It’s free… as in air, and seawater

Instruction :

1. Download the ZIP file from : Our Download Page

2. Please extract the ZIP file, there’s a “Gmail.wgz” file inside. Transfer it to your device and install.

2. On Nokia N8, and other Symbian^3 devices, a software simply called Email is included to manage emails. While it may be enough for normal users to check emails once in a few minutes (it does not do push email, by the way), it does not fulfill my needs. It’s slow, takes forever to download attachments and 1001 other reasons that put me off from using it.

3. I searched, researched and tried a couple of solutions to get real mobile email, with push, such as (among others) :
- Profimail (great software but not for me and it’s pricey)
- System Seven (RAM hungry)
- Gmail J2ME client (it’s Java…)
- RoadSync from Dataviz (doesnt even run on Nokia N8)

4. Finally, headache after headache, I choose Mobile Documents developed by Visiarc. It has everything I need for an excellent mobile email client.

5. It offers push email with a different approach. It handles attachments very well. It accepts multiple email accounts and it is reliable.

6. I will talk more about Mobile Documents in the upcoming weeks. For now, enjoy some screenshots of Mobile Documents running on my Nokia N8. More information about it at http://www.mobiledocuments.com.

7. Oh… I have been informed by Peter Lindgren that an optimised version of Mobile Documents for Symbian^3 devices is coming our way very soon with some enhancements onboard. Cant wait

8. Have you used Mobile Documents? What do you think about it? Do you like it?

- Asri al-Baker, November 15th 2010

Documents are streamed, progressively downloaded while it is viewed. Below, a DOC page is rendered in landscape mode on Nokia N8. Notice how the half of the page is readable, while the other half is being processed.

If you dont want to view the page layout, you can strip all page contents, leaving only raw text to be dislayed, for easy readability, as shown below.

A couple of Mobile Documents related videos :

Visiarc’s “Mobile Documents” for S60 – exclusive from Mobile Industry Review on Vimeo.

Where?

Kelantan Delights
1-5, Level 1, Sooka Sentral
Jalan Stesen Sentral
50470 Kuala Lumpur

When?

February 10th 2010 (Wednesday
5.00 to 7.00 PM

Who should come?
- Symbian users
- Symbian and other developers
- Symbian Enthusiasts
- If you are in KL or near KL
- Just for fun

What is the Agenda?
- Talk
- Eat
- Have fun!

Why I should come?
- Meet cool people
- Talk about Symbian and it’s ecosystem
- Discussing ideas to improve Symbian
- Have fun!

There will be some official SYMBIAN goodies up for grab for early birds. Come!!! Places are limited.

“I think the Kuala Lumpur Stammtisch is a great idea!” – Sebastian Brannstrom, Symbian Foundation.

More information about Symbian Stammtisch at : http://developer.symbian.org/wiki/index.php/Symbian_Stammtisch

You can also follow the event’s progress on Facebook : First KLSS

If you are on Twitter (who doesnt?), watch out for the hashtag #klss

Note
===

1. KLSS – Kuala Lumpur Symbian Stammtisch is a community effort towards a more vibrant and active Symbian community in Malaysia in conjunction with Symbian Foundation’s continuous effort in getting more feedback from Symbian community all over the world.

2. We hope this first KLSS will be a landmark and history in promoting and bringing more awareness regarding Symbian’s open nature. Whether you are an individual or a company, you are welcomed to contribute and together building a global brand name with Symbian Foundation.

3. Thanks to Symbian Foundation, which fully supports this initiative. Lee Williams, Haydn Shaughnessy, Sebastian Brannstrom, Susana Posada, Lauren Sarno, Ashlee Godwin, Annabelle Cooke in which, this event wont be possible.

4. Should there be anyone who are willing to contribute to this event, please email me asri at i-symbian dot com.

1. Here is the link to the product page : Vivaz

2. It was known as Kurara when the prototype photos leaked.

3. The specification looks great.

4. Enjoy some videos of Vivaz!

2. They have developed really outstanding products for ER5, UIQ2, UIQ 3 and now they also produced applications for S60.

3. I interviewed Malcolm over email to ask him some questions that I kept in my mind since a few years ago.

4. I hope you guys will enjoy the interview, as much as I do

Malcolm Lithgow

Introduction

1. how do you do malcolm? what’s the weather like in australia at the moment?

Well, it’s hot and humid at the moment — getting close to Christmas time.

2. what’s your favourite past time killer? Other than sitting in front of your computer of course

Photography, including editing the photos and creating photo books is probably my favourite, though I also spend a lot of time reading and watching TV (particularly great shows like Lie to me, Lost, Doctor Who, etc.)

3. you use the word “Chief Dreamer”. It must be great to be able to live your dream! No?

The hard part is making the dream reality — or having dreams that have a chance of being realised. It’s good to be able to dream, though.

DreamSpring

1. you are active in the industry for many years now. since the psion days if i reckon correctly. how does it feel being able to survive the changes and challenges especially with regards to application development? many software houses from the psion days did not survive till today. secrets to your success?

Well, we’ve survived simply out of sheer stubbornness, I think. The Psion machines had a good community around them, although it seemed to have happened mostly because of the machines, not because of anything else Psion did.

The switch to Symbian both ushered in a deliberate focus on third party developers, but also an era of constant change and instability for them. We’ve spent most of our time porting from platform to platform, which has limited our ability to grow our portfolio or product feature set the way we would have liked. So far none of Symbian’s decisions have made our job much easier (hopefully Qt will be the first).

2. you only have 2 excellent products that are available to customers, dreamconnect and dreamlife. how do you survive all these years with only these 2 products? if it’s possible, would you mind sharing some numbers?

See the answer above.

3. you offer symbian products only. is there any plan in the future to dwell into other territories like Android, iPhone, Maemo, Windows Mobile, webOS etc? Surely, the market looks attractive enough to bring your products accross other platforms.

We keep our eye on all these platforms. I’ll share my thinking on each of this here:

iPhone:
Pros: easy to develop for; reasonably large market; good buzz
Cons: crowded marketplace; uncertain ability to reach market (depends on Apple’s whims, especially since we replace standard apps); crucial functionality missing from SDK (calendar alarms)
Result: not worth the risk for our current apps

Android:
Pros: growing market (for now); good buzz; various channels to market
Cons: poor development environment (multiple, different targets and UIs); small market; uncertain app delivery framework; uncertain future
Result: not worth the bother (I think Android is hopelessly over-hyped, like much originating from Silicon Valley)

Maemo:
Pros: growing market; easy development (Qt base plus full source); strong app shop (Ovi)
Cons: tiny market; relatively immature OS
Result: too small to bother with

Windows Mobile:
Pros: easy to develop for; various channels to market (and getting better); mature OS
Cons: uncertain future UI (like Symbian); crowded market
Result: best proposition, however still much smaller than Symbian

4. how about the challenges in developing the applications. surely, porting from one platform to another involves planning, structuring, documentation etc. how do you manage that?

Since we’ve done so many ports now, we have our engine pretty well separated from the UI. In fact, we have three types of code: engine (which is identical on all Symbian platforms), common UI (shared between UIQ and S60), and S60 (shared between 3rd Ed and 5th Ed). That’s a lot of flexibility and complexity. If we were writing from scratch we certainly wouldn’t do that.

However, the UI is always such an unknown. Developing UI’s is a much more iterative process than developing engines (the iteration is much finer grained). This makes it harder to plan for. Our S60 port, for example, surprised us by how hard it was to implement our vision using the S60 framework. It involved lots of attempts that had to be discarded eventually. The S60 framework is far cruder than UIQ, particularly UIQ 3. There were lots of controls we had to implement from scratch, and whole frameworks had to be improvised.

We involved testers in this a lot earlier in the process than previously, to ensure we weren’t simply pandering to our own tastes, and to handle the wide diversity of device types supported by S60. Of course, this didn’t make things go faster — quite the reverse.

Part of the difficulty is that, rather than starting with the SDK and following the “line of least resistance” in coding something (which many of the Symbian vendors clearly do) our approach is to start with the customer and then try to build something that meets their needs. This makes our job a lot harder. As an example, the split-screen edit view in DreamLife was an innovation that the UIQ 3 framework supported quite well, once you had figured out the complexities of that same framework. However, S60′s framework is very simplistic, and there’s just no way to support a split screen like that without basically rewriting it, so after various attempts we came up with the popup day grid in the edit view as a solution that worked well for the end user. However all this takes a lot of time, effort and learning.

5. How many people are there in your team?

We’ve had a peak of five or six people in the past, but we’re down to three now.

DreamConnect

1. are you satisfied with the result? i mean, looking at dreamconnect, in my opinion, the UIQ 3 version is the best. with better list view details, thumbnail support and stability. how can you make the s60 version better? what are the things you couldnt do in the s60 version that you wished you could?

Well, the lack of “mini detail view” in the list is one of the missing features of the S60 DC. We actually have a solution half-coded to that, so that would be nice to add. We’d like to add the missing things like Smart Find and Dynamic Messaging (I have ideas for a better UI for the latter), but these are real power-user features.

I’d like to improve the way the contact editor works, especially for things like long notes and for 5th Ed. There are many other features that have been on our todo list for so long (some since the EPOC days) but have never seen the light of day because of the constant porting to new UI frameworks!

DreamConnect ER5 (Psion)

2. for years, s60 built in Contacts application is too minimalistic and too simple for advanced users. for example, if a contact has a long note, you need to press Options and selet Edit to view the note. Not very user friendly I must say. dreamconnect solve this and many other problems. however, it is not entirely integrated to the S60 system. say for example, one wants to save a new contact from the last received calls, the system is still using S60 contacts. what do you think?

DreamConnect S60 5th Edition (Symbian^1)

This is an issue I raised with Symbian way back before S60 even existed. The idea of being able to redirect application “vectors” to 3rd party apps. Nowdays it could be very easily done with ecom or equivalent and good API’s. Still not happening, though… It’s not really in Nokia’s (short term) interests, to be honest, so why should they bother?

3. will dreamconnect be the default Contacts application for the new Symbian Foundation UI? Is it even possible? Because in my opinion, you guys will prevent a lot of headache by including dreamconnect (or even dreamlife!) inside all futere Symbian devices

We can dream. Having looked at the source for the Contacts application (as a foundation member), I think it more likely that DreamSpring could contribute certain UI technologies, but we haven’t started down that path yet — that’s a radical change to our development and business practices and requires a lot of figuring out. How do we make money to survive?

4. historically speaking, your ER5 version of dreamconnect is your only product, then you move into UIQ 2 followed by UIQ 3. but all those platforms can be considered dead now. only now you venture into S60. in your opinion, which is the most flexible and better symbian platform?

The best platform so far was undoubtedly UIQ 3. S60 5th Ed has better underlying technology (if only because it’s based on a newer instance of Symbian), but UIQ 3′s UI was wonderfully flexible, and was developing in a good direction. All that was really lacking in UIQ 3 was a decent GUI UI developer, like Qt’s Creator.

DreamConnect UIQ 3

It was very frustrating to see UIQ 3 dumped in favour of S60 (though understandable). But the rapid switch away from S60 to Qt, while also understandable, rubbed a lot of salt into still-raw wounds.

5. What is your future plan for dreamconnect?

Connecting DreamConnect to services has always been our vision. Unifying contacts (and calendar) in a powerful and business-friendly way is something that no-one (even MS) seems to be taking that seriously. It’s something we’re still keen on, and may result in some radical changes to what we think of as DreamConnect.

DreamLife

1. if i remember correctly, you coined the phrase “Life Information Management“, which is still used widely on your website and your products’ info sheet. where does it come from and what is the philosophy behind it? What’s wrong with “Personal Information Management”?

We wanted to find a way to express how this information (contacts and calendar) was connected together and involved the whole of your life (including work), not just personal stuff. Thus we came up with the term “Life Information Management”, which has taken on a life of it’s own, I’m proud to say.

2. And DreamLife is one of the ways to achieve Life Information Management? How? How about other products?

DreamLife takes the first steps of (a) properly linking contacts and calendar so you can navigate from calendar to contacts (and back again at some time in the future); (b) of implementing an information categorisation system that’s powerful enough to handle your whole life — in DL and DC that’s done with heirarchical categories, in future we want to have even more powerful mechanisms.

Most other products on mobile devices don’t seem to understand the way that a mobile device can act as a hub of your whole life — both integrating and differentiating personal and business data. Indeed, mobile devices are so bad at this that most people who need to differentiate between personal and business data simply carry two phones!

We’re certainly not there yet, and the constant race to keep up with Symbian’s course changes are making it very difficult…

DreamLife UIQ 3

3. With limited screen real estate on mobile devices, displaying valuable information will require a lot of compromises. I mean, looking at DreamLife’s calendar pane, I can see you are moving away from the traditional calendar display on mobile phones (weekly view, daily view, monthly view). You are bringing more desktop-like calendar experience to mobile devices with colour support for different categories (which brings reference to modern desktop calendar solution like iCal and Google Calendar). Why DreamLife was designed that way?

I’m a visual planner. To me a list of appointments of tasks conveys very little information. But a grid view shows me at a glance how I’m using my time (especially with coloured categories). It’s that simple. I recognise that there are a lot of people who work better with lists, and at present DreamLife simply isn’t suitable for them. I make no apologies for that. That doesn’t mean that we don’t want to be able to meet those people’s needs, too — we do, but we saw an opportunity to both differentiate DreamLife and meet the needs of visual planners like me, and we took that opportunity.

4. you have a standalone contacts manager, which is DreamConnect. But you dont have a standalone calendar application. You could have 3 products. A contacts manager (DreamConnect) , a calendar (?), and a combination of both (DreamLife). And sell them separately. Right?

We could, and we’ve gone so far as planning such a project, however we haven’t had a chance to follow through on it yet, and I remain doubtful of the value of such an effort.

5. What is the future plan for DreamLife? Will it include it’s own synching engine to sync with the cloud say to Google Calendar or MS Exchange Server or SyncML servers?

We’re well into development of our syncing solution, which I was demoing at SEE 2009. We have our own CalDAV technology which we’ve integrated with some tech from Symbian’s new CalDAV component, so we have a solution for FP1, FP2 and 5th Ed phones. We’re aiming our initial release at supporting public CalDAV servers like Google and Yahoo!, but in future we’ll be implementing our own services.

Others

1. why symbian?

See the discussion above, and add in the fact that Symbian is far larger than any of these markets.

2. what happen to riyala?

We’re still working on that, but we realised that we really don’t want to release a half-baked solution and have the sort of problems that, say, Mobile Me has had. So it’ll be quite a while yet…

3. The future of the new Open Source Symbian is not written on the wall yet. Nothing is concrete. What do you think about Symbian walking the Open Source path? How Open Source will benefit you as an independent software vendor?

Actually, I’ve just written a piece on that in our “Insight” blog. You can see it at http://www.dreamspring.com/news/insight-2009/symbian-moving-toward-openness.html

4. UIQ died and efforts are made to bring some of it’s designs and functions into the new Open Source Symbian. Do you believe there will be some UIQ legacies inside the new Symbian Foundation OS? What UIQ functions that you hope will be made available inside this new OS?

I’m afraid I’ve given up on that one. However, one of the greatest UI innovations in UIQ 3 (apart from the complete touch/keyboard integration) was the list view with it’s “mini-detail view” expansion. That was very clever, and I’d like to see a list view widget like that again.

5. But it’s still a long way to go. Symbian^4 which is said to unite S60, UIQ and MOAP under one roof, wont see the light untill somewhere in the end of 2010. That’s like a gazillion years in the mobile industry. Technology moves forward so fast where something would become obsolete and old-fashioned very fast. Your opinion?

Symbian’s current attitude that S60 is simply abandoned come Symbian^4 is very foolhardy to my mind. After all, Symbian^4 is both some time away, but also relatively close. Thus you’re telling developers don’t bother developing for S60 because we’re chucking it in a couple of years, but don’t bother developing for S^4 either because we haven’t created it yet. Does that make sense to you? And the only reason I’ve heard for discarding S60 from future phones, from a Nokia engineer, was ludicrous: the S60 libraries would take up too much RAM! Come on, how much has RAM grown in the last couple of years — Nokia needs to get a grip on reality here. I attribute MS’s successful dominance of the PC industry to two things: anti-competitive practices (which they’ve been convicted of) and unstinting attention to backward compatibility. Without the latter the former would not have been sufficient — ordinary people buy Windows PC’s because they know that virtually anything that want to run on them will more-or-less work. When that breaks down, MS suffers and quickly moves to fix it. Nokia and Symbian should be paying attention to that valuable lesson.

6. Qt will replace Avkon. Does that mean you will have to re-write all your codes from scratch? What is your opinion about Qt on Symbian’s future?

No, just the UI component, which is a huge part of our code, anyway. I have very mixed feelings about this, see above. However, Qt really impressed me with the demo I saw at the show, and if Nokia can get the Symbian widget set right (and preferably shared by other platforms) then it could make things a lot easier for us in the long run.

7. Does DreamSpring contribute to Symbian Foundation? In what way?

Apart from our membership fee we are currently too busy porting to S60 to contribute much. However we’re always looking for ways that we can contribute. There’s much less benefit for a small products company than for a large company (like Sun) or a services company (like Ixonos), so we need to bear that in mind.

8. The trend nowadays is to sell applications through application stores. You know, Nokia Ovi Store, Sony Ericsson PlayNow, Samsung Mobile Club and so on. Do you put your products inside these stores? How’s the market acceptance? Your opinion about application stores? Is it just a trend?

No, I think it’s here to stay. However, I think subject-specialist app stores are a likely development, and I’m glad to note that Horizon supports this sort of development.

9. Tell us 5 favourite 3rd party Symbian applications that you use daily and cant live without? Is it true that the value of smartphones and advanced mobile devices are measured according to what the users want? Not what the devices can do?

Obviously DreamConnect and DreamLife get a heavy workout, and not just for testing but because I really use them. Also Opera Mobile 10 is great, Mobireader (which really needs a 5th Ed version), Worldmate (or now PsiLoc World Traveller) is very handy, and Olive Tree bible software.

10. Will you see Symbian Operating System evolving into something bigger, not limited to smartphones? Say, in the future, people create their own Symbian based distributions for say, netbooks, Mobile Internet Devices (MID), satnav devices etc?. Look at Linux, there are hundreds of distros available. Will we see Symbian going to that route? It’s Open Source anyway.

It’s possible, but I think Linux has really filled that niche, certainly in terms of mindshare if not competence. Symbian’s core strengths are its great real-time kernel and its strong suite of comms and PIM support. Maybe an eMagazine reader, or the old communications hub idea (a Pocket Server instead of a Home Server), or something like that?

Thanks a ton Malcolm!
—

Visit DreamSpring’s official website http://www.dreamspring.com to loearn more about DreamLife and DreamConnect.

Read my review of these products at allaboutsymbian.com :

1. DreamLife for UIQ 3

2. DreamConnect for UIQ 3

- Asri al-Baker